My current
interests center on language-based communication between humans and
robots and on aspects of core speech recognition, such as
out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word processing. I am also interested in
approaches to learning based on implicit supervision and on improvement
of speech system knowledge through dialog.
Check this list of publications.

Over time my
research interests have revolved around speech perception and
recognition, speech interfaces,
spoken dialog systems and language in general. I've headed the SpeechWear
project that produced an early mobile speech system; I'm still
interested in the topic of mobile
speech. I also headed the Communicator
project, which dealt with spoken dialog system architectures. Olympus, a successor
system, is available in Open Source. The Ravenclaw
dialog
manager came out of the Communicator work and is the current
foundation for many of the systems that we create. RavenClaw
incorporates dialog management ideas that were first introduced in the
Office Manager (OM) system and further developed in successor systems,
including Scheduler and AGENDA. Papers listed on the publications
describe this work. Some
videos from our group.

In 1996 I
implemented a set of web-based
tools that are used to generate a knowledge base for the open
source Sphinx
recognition system, including a language model and a pronouncing
dictionary. It's proved to be quite popular, and I've continued to
maintain the tool and expand its capabilities. Do try it out if you are
building a recognition system (the model formats work for any
ARPA-compliant system).
We continue to maintain Ravenclaw and the Olympus dialog system toolkit in open source.

If you'd like to know
more about me read this biographical sketch.
You can also find me at LinkedIn
and on Plaxo;
these sites will have somewhat different information about me. I'm involved in several
organizations focused on spoken language interaction (SIGdial)
and speech technologies (AVIOS).

The following papers cover our work in the past while. It's probably out of date.
Check here
for a complete list. Or just look me up here.